Wasted Worry

i was once a young man with a head of hair that, apart from it's lack of color, looked like exploding fire works.

there was a lot of hair up there.

i used to be able to hide several bright yellow pencils in it.

once it measured 22 iches across...we measured it. it was huge. it was every where. it was unruly and curly and frizzy and coarse; and, to be honest, i don't know why i ever wore it that way.

it was pretty freaky. i attended a vocational school...i took four years of technical drafting and design...3 hours a day we drew machine parts in orthographic projection...i was pretty useless in it. my mind never worked mechanically...i am definitely an abstract sort of thinker...but iwas in td & d.

do you know why? bc it was the only shop that would allow my hippy head of hair in.

welding didn't want me to catch on fire. carpentry did want me to get caught in a saw. sheet metal didn't want me scratching up the tin with the giant brillo pad on my head.

i guess the drafting dept wasn't worried about me getting my hair caught in the pencil sharpner...

any way...it was a lot of hair. when i finally got it cut (as in, i met a girl)it filled a kitchen garbage can...

what was i thinking?

anyway...at the height of my "nest head" (as my friends called it and me) i was visiting a friend's house and his uncle said to me "you are going to be bald headed!"

i laughed.

he said it again "you are going to be bald headed, i'm telling you". "now way" i replied, "look at all this hair". "lots of people have hair in their teens, son. i can see it. you are going to be bald headed".

wow...i thought. my older brother had already started thinning on top...could he be right?

"no" i told the man. "i'm not. i just have a high hair line...like my dad". i think i was trying to convince me more than i was trying to convince him.

i can't go bald! i thought. i'm nest head...i have more hair than absolom (2 Sam 14:26 & 18:9--you have to stop right now and look up those verses!)...and i dismissed what the man said.

but i wondered. he might know...he's been around...he's bald. what if i go bald?

soon, wondering became worrying. and you know what you say about worrying! so, then i was worried about being so worried...all the while thinking that all my worrying was going to cause my hair to fall out.

occasionally i noticed hair caught up in the drain...it's starting, i thought. man...how would i look? maybe i should just shave my head bald now...why wait? why go thru the torture of explaining? why feel bad all the time? just get used to it!

well...even with all that worrying, those of you who know me today know i have (high hair line and all) a thick, wooly head of blue (that's a whole nother story) hair. of course, thanks to my own uncle (sam) i've learned to wear it a bit closer to the bone...but it's all there.

i was worried about something i couldn't change. it did me no good...why bother?

don't worry for your life...live it. love it. grow in it. trust God.